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Forum Updates

A while back ago I recall a few members were interested in being notified when there is new activity in a given section or thread, I forget which they really wanted, but I imagine it had something to do with spoilers. So, let's talk about subscriptions...

-- FOR THE TL;DR PEOPLE: YOU CAN BE INSTANTLY NOTIFIED ABOUT NEW SPOILER THREADS --

Many of you might be aware of certain features popular to other websites, such as thread or forum subscriptions
...

Hey everyone, I just added another mod to the forum called 'Who Quoted Me?'. This mod does exactly what the name implies, it notifies when, where, and by whom you are quoted. This works in two ways:

1.) You are notified on the notifications drop-down the same way you are notified about new PM's, new friend requests, and new profile comments.
2.) If you open your userCP, and the notification drop down will take you there, you can see a list of the most recent 10 times you were quoted.

Please note that if a post that quoted you is deleted, the thread won't be listed, but the user who quoted you will still show in the list. It's sort of a bug, but not really worth fixing. If you notice any other problems with this, please let me know. Also, note that this is a test run of this mod. There's a possibility we might remove this in the future for one reason or another.

Ok, where to start. I guess I should start things off by blaming my self for absolutely everything that went wrong. Friday went from surprisingly-according-to-plan to what-happened-to-the-plan fast. At least as far as the forum upgrade goes, it was a total belly-flop. So how about I tell you how it was supposed to go down, and then go over how it actually went down.

THE PLAN:

We didn't really have an ultimate plan. Believe it or not, that wasn't the problem. Actually, no, we had a plan, and it was fairly elaborate, but it wasn't complete until we finished testing vBulletin 4 and decided to use the upgrade as the pseudo-finale. For that to be believable to any degree, however, we had to first stage something that would potentially warrant the server actually going down: staff in-fighting. Conveniently enough that was more or less a part of what we wanted to do. So Robby plays the role of himself, as usual, and kicks things off with some random and unbiased temp bans, no major harm done, and Urouge and I disapprove. Robby kicks things up a notch and then "complains" to Vanessa, who, pretending to not really have all of the info makes matters worst. Once she is up to speed on things-- from her "point of view"-- she fights fire with fire: make Jerk Disease a temp mod. Except that he wasn't actually a mod, we just pretended he was by changing the color of his name. Robby continues to ban without bias while Jerk Disease throws out names to make things appear aimed. Due to some unforeseen circumstances-- the Collectibles section, for example-- we had to do some damage control mid-prank, but that was an honest mistake from the mods.

Long story short I eventually ban Jerk Disease, Vanessa and I have an immature fight for power, and the site goes down. Oh! And the filter was just a distraction to make the visible prank (the banning) an obvious and less stale April Fools gag. Changing that filter every ten minutes was pretty fun, I must admit.

So what went wrong?

THE FAILRUE:

The first-- and biggest-- unforeseen complication was an emergency coming up on Jonas's end. Jonas had to leave immediately, and as such was unable to relay to me that he wouldn't be around for the upgrade. See, the site was supposed to go down at around 3PM Pacific time, making the in-fighting relatively short and the chaos much more controlled. As many of you know, the site didn't go down until 11PM, so we were forced to make the fighting and banning more believable by escalating matters and stalling. I think that, really, is where, how, and why some feelings were hurt. For that, I apologize again. The whole prank was an act, so I promise you any and all theatrics were just that, theatrics.

Moving on: the upgrade. So I took the site down much later than planned and continued to wait it out for Jonas. As we all know, or should know by this point in time, Jonas never came back. I talked things over with the other staff and, having gone through the upgrade process two months prior, decided to do the upgrade by myself.

R.I.P Arlong Park.

No but seriously, the initial upgrade bombed out because of a few important files that decided they had no interest in being transferred with the rest of the crowd. This presented a huge problem for the database, and after some time of troubleshooting I decided to just drop the fubar database and load the backup from Friday. Six. Hours. Later!! the backup finally finished restoring and I started the upgrade again, making sure that the files were in place this time. SUC-sort of-CESS! The initial upgrade went through without a hitch, and I moved on to part two of the upgrade. This also was moving along quite smoothly until.... POWER OUTAGE YAY! My power went out. 93% complete with the upgrade and my power went out. Normally that shouldn't be a problem because I would have the session running on the server and not my PC, but in my haste I didn't (know to) run the upgrade within a new screen session, and when my power went out so did my session and that caused problems: From Sunday morning at 2AM until this morning (Monday) at 9AM the query had not completed and instead used up 100% of the CPU on the server, making it impossible for me to stop the query.

In comes this story's hero, Jonas. Jonas returned to save the day this morning (again, Monday) by restarting the SQL server. Once the server had been rebooted, I was able to restart the upgrade process and viola!, here we are.

So, let's all give a round of applause to Jonas, the hero, and throw some much deserved tomatoes at me, the villain, for thinking I could do the upgrade without Jonas.

THE END.

PS - Anyone who has a problem with Vanessa can take matters up with me, because she is awesome and was doing an EXCELLENT job playing the villain on Friday. Also, normally I'd blame everything on Robby and call it a day, but today I'm giving him a special day off.

Well, we made it. It was a rough weekend but we are finally upgraded to vBulletin 4.

I'm sure you all are seeing that things have changed quite a bit. Well, not so much changed, but it is a little different, and there is much more potential. There is, for example, a more advanced video posting option, allowing you to select from more video streaming sites than just YouTube. There is a more advanced search feature. There is a new visitor messaging feature in your profiles, allowing you to leave notes or have conversations with people. We can integrate with Facebook and twitter, should we choose to do so. There is a donate button on the navbar, for those of you who would like to help us with the monthly server costs. Obviously this news section is new.

There are quite a few more additions, which I am sure you will all get to know over the next week or two, so we all hope you enjoy the changes. In the mean time, if you find anything you believe you should have access to, something you shouldn't have access to, or just something that isn't working, please let a staff member know or leave a comment in this posting.

That said, welcome to the new Arlong Park Forums.

- AP Staff

PS: This Fishman Island theme is the only working theme available at the moment. We are working on others, some of which may be available in the coming weeks, and we are looking for people who have ideas for themes and preferably the skills to bring those ideas to life as well.

Edit: I haven't been able to completely rebuild the search index yet, so search might not display appropriate results. Give that some time. If I can't run it today/tonight, Jonas and I can figure it out some time this week. For this reason, among others, it is possible we will have more downtime in the coming days. Just be patient, this was a huge leap for us.